Biogeographic breaks, that is, shifts in overall species composition, are expected to be associated with phylogeographic breaks because of shared ecological or evolutionary factors operating at both the interspecific and intraspecific level. Here, we test the hypothesis that biogeographic and phylogeographic boundaries are congruent using mountain species of the Iranian Plateau as our model system. To this end, we analysed the...

The global decline of terrestrial species is largely due to the degradation, loss and fragmentation of their habitats. The conversion of natural ecosystems for cropland, rangeland, forest products and human infrastructure are the primary causes of habitat deterioration. Due to the paucity of data on the past distribution of species and the scarcity of fine‐scale habitat conversion maps, however, accurate assessment of the rece...

Aim Comprehensive, global information on species' occurrences is an essential biodiversity variable and central to a range of applications in ecology, evolution, biogeography and conservation. Expert range maps often represent a species' only available distributional information and play an increasing role in conservation assessments and macroecology. We provide global range maps for the native ranges of all extant mammal spec...

Spatial data mining helps to find hidden but potentially informative patterns from large and high-dimensional geoscience data. Non-spatial learners generally look at the observations based on their relationships in the feature space, which means that they cannot consider spatial relationships between regionalised variables. This study introduces a novel spatial random forests technique based on higher-order spatial statistics...

The particularities of geosystems and geoscience data must be understood before any development or implementation of statistical learning algorithms. Without such knowledge, the predictions and inferences may not be accurate and physically consistent. Accuracy, transparency and interpretability, credibility, and physical realism are minimum criteria for statistical learning algorithms when applied to the geosciences. This stud...

Colour vision varies within the family Atelidae (Primates, Platyrrhini), which consists of four genera with the following cladistic relationship: { Alouatta [ Ateles ( Lagothrix and Brachyteles )]}. Spider monkeys ( Ateles ) and woolly monkeys ( Lagothrix ) are characteristic of platyrrhine monkeys in possessing a colour vision polymorphism. The polymorphism results from allelic variation of the single‐locus middle‐to‐long wav...